Ear Job

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Running After My Hat passed one milestone this week: the hundredth post. (I’m not sure which surprises me more — that it’s (a) that many, or (b) that few.)

Yesterday I realized I’d passed another milestone, of sorts.

After uploading the wonder-of-waterfalls entry, I was getting ready for work. I’d already showered and was now drying my hair. Since I’ve been growing it long, it naturally takes longer to dry and thus affords me more time to think. And I was thinking back, this time, about some of the wording in the waterfalls thing. Specifically this brief passage: “And as I made my way along the trail, I found myself enthralled by the sound of the water. Water ran everywhere, in all those delicious-sounding verbs like trickle, babble, and plash.” Sort of wishing I’d come up with more examples, you see.

As I wrapped the cord around the hair dryer, though, what jumped out at me from those two sentences wasn’t the phrase at the end. It was two phrases in the middle: sound of the water and delicious-sounding.

Sound. Sounding. They jumped out at me just as I was putting the hearing aids in.

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Water Falls. It Really Does.

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[First, to get this out of the way, allow me to introduce you to Miss Globe-head. That’s her over there on the right. And if you don’t know why I’m introducing the two of you, please check my previous post.]

For a number of reasons — most of them having to do with writing, by the way — I’ve been fascinated for years by the country of Wales.

(The Missus might argue with that “most of them,” by the way. She believes that I must have lived a former life there, and maybe she’s right. Not that I have any memory of it. Or evidence of it, for that matter, beyond the fascination.)

This Welsh thing of mine has taken several turns. I’ve got books about the history and culture of Wales. I’ve got a Welsh-English/English-Welsh dictionary. Somewhere along the line I even picked up a cassette-tape “teach yourself Welsh” language-instruction course.

Sometime in the early ’90s I was in a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, and came across a beautiful picture book called The Waterfalls of Wales, by one John Llewelyn Jones. (And it was beautiful, despite the fact that except for the cover, all its photographs were in black-and-white.)

Aside from the Welsh connection, I think what drew me to the book was the subject: waterfalls in general.

Now, if you’ve been following weather news during this hurricane season, you know that the topic of running water is especially fraught for people around the state of Florida right now. But the water-borne terrors of Fay, say, are of a completely different character than the sorts of running water I’m thinking of.

Consider, for example, this photograph (not from the book) of Sgwd Isaf Clun Gwyn, Afon Mellte (roughly, “White Meadow Lower Falls, [on the] River Mellte” — and if anyone can supply more polish to the translation, please speak up!):

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Wonders Across the World

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Cynicism is an easy response to life.

(It’s also often a funny response to life, which may be a good part of its appeal. Sarcasm, satire, parody, stand-up comedy, cartoons — all depend for their success on the glib assumption not that some things are better than others, but that many, perhaps most, things are worse than others.)

Famously, Theodore Sturgeon once claimed — in a formulation known commonly as Sturgeon’s Law — that “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” More often than not, Sturgeon’s Law is cited as a commentary on that ninety percent. This disregards its original use: as a defense of the ten percent. The idea is that you can’t reasonably point to some class of popular culture (science fiction, in Sturgeon’s case) and extrapolate from the merely largest chunk of it to the entire class. Another way of stating it, indeed, is: Ten percent of everything is worth paying attention to, even celebrating.

Author Rebecca Ramsey seems to be a fierce and whimsical proponent of the notion that there might be an inexhaustible supply of things worth paying attention to, even celebrating. Granted, she’s only been blogging since April. But it’s astonishing that every day, she finds something to cheer about.

Her blog goes by the apropos moniker Wonders Never Cease. And if, because of that title or because of my description so far, you guess that it’s a fatuous “Everything Is Beautiful” inanity… Well, just look at the site.

The idea is to focus on a single good thing or experience every day, not writing about it in airy lyrical terms but in punchy!!! prose with lots, LOTS! of exuberant and especially SHORT!!! phrases/sentences, generously exclamation-pointed, and illustrated with plentiful photos from Flickr and other sources.

What kinds of topics does she cover? The most recent posts in her “Wonders of Nature” category might give you a good idea:

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Cat People

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Just a short post for the moment… Will post again later today, to tell you about tomorrow’s post.

(For now, let’s just say I’m taking part in Rebecca Ramsey’s “Wonders of the World” blog party. I’ll also be talking about Rebecca’s… interesting Wonders Never Cease blog itself.)

In the meantime, Colleen Lindsay of the Swivet blog recently pointed her readers to a real honest-to-God labor of love — very cool if you’re a cat lover. (If you’re not, eh, no problem; as I said, I’ll be back to post again later today.)

Presenting, of all things, a cat sanctuary, The Cat House on the Kings:

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Department of Neighborhood Security (2)

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Last month, I reported on a new initiative which our local neighborhood was undertaking — a neighborhood crime watch. The Missus and I learned of this initiative, as I said, via a letter from our street’s block captain: “As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, which will allow two-way communication between neighbors and the neighborhood crime watch program.”

Now, you need to understand something about the way our household is organized — or rather, isn’t. We’re very good about hanging on to Important Papers such as bills, insurance records, and so on. We’re equally (and regrettably) good about hanging on to Less Important Papers, such as magazines from 1994 or so. And then there are Truly Unimportant Papers — political-candidate promotional flyers, the bi-weekly mailing from the local swimming-pool company which doesn’t know that our property will never be suitable for a swimming pool, cheap 10-page ads from department stores in the next county, and so on — which go more or less immediately into the recycling bin.

This letter from our block captain fell into a fourth category. It has no formal, capitalized name, this category. It’s a category which might be loosely described as “papers which may at some point turn out to be important, but we really hope they don’t because [fill in reason], but maybe they’ll just disappear on their own accord and thereby relieve us of further responsibility for possessing them.”

And you know what? By golly, such papers eventually do wander off someplace, their tails between their legs. I imagine a whole auditorium of them, somewhere beyond the pale of imagination, eternally whimpering in neglect.

One of the hammer blows which Tropical Storm/Depression Fay landed upon our area was the pair of trees (not just one, as I’d thought earlier) which fell over in a neighbor’s yard. One simply lay the width of the front yard. The other, even bigger, remained propped on a corner of the (remarkably undamaged) house for a few days following the storm’s passing. I told The Missus I couldn’t imagine how the tree could be removed without punching through a wall or the roof. “They’ll have to use a crane,” I said.

In the event, no crane was required.

Three guys drove up in a plain white pickup. In the back of the truck were an assortment of chainsaws, about the length of an arm, and a couple of loooooooong orange-nylon ropes. The latter, they draped over the limbs of a nearby undamaged tree. One end of each was wrapped and tied around the upper end of the tree; the other ends were affixed to the rear of the pickup truck. All they had to do was drive the truck forward, and up would come the tree.

Needless to say, this operation — in a neighborhood so pedestrian that most people are in bed by 9 p.m. — drew a little knot of onlookers. We gathered in the cul-de-sac, discussing theories of geometry and the dynamics of nylon, the concepts of levers and pulleys, as though we actually had any idea how this would actually work. It seemed obvious that as soon as the tree was lifted off the roof, it would swing back and, I don’t know, take out the entire north wall of the second floor.

Into the mini-crowd suddenly wandered the block captain. He didn’t say anything at first, so I rather hoped he was simply assessing the risks and, perhaps, constructing in his head the preferred evacuation route when the guy turned the truck’s ignition key.

Not so. He was just waiting for a break in the conversation.

I felt a timid tap on my shoulder. “John,” he said, “did you ever receive my letter…?”

At that point i knew I was doomed. After all, of course we received his letter. I even remembered receiving it. Between gaps among his words, I even fancied I could hear, in the distance, the bleating of a small lost white sheet of paper.

So anyway, what I told him was that after the tree thing was over, I’d go back home, find (gulp) his letter — which included his email address — and send him my own email address and our phone numbers.

(All of which would have happened, by the way, except that there is no longer such a sheet of paper. So I just typed up the information he wanted, printed it out, stuck it in an envelope, and then put the envelope in his mailbox.)

The conversation turned to other matters, in an attempt to relieve the suspense as we waited for the truck to start moving. Few of us had ever really spent time talking to one another, so naturally one of the first orders of business was: What do you do for a living?

I said, “I’m a computer programmer. A Web developer.” (Both of which are true. I don’t typically just flat-out tell people I’m an aspiring author, or perhaps re-author would be more accurate. Other aspiring authors will understand.)

“Ooooh,” several people said. And before anyone else could jump in, the block captain took advantage of their slow-footedness to buttonhole me himself.

“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “See, I just got a new computer and I’m trying to transfer all my contacts from the old Outlook Express list to the new one and it’s just, not, working…”

I was reminded of this story this afternoon, when I came across a link from the Froogville blog (over there on the right, under “Writers to Be Read”). Froog had included the image at the top of this RAMH post in a post of his own, saying he’d found it at his “new favourite website, FrostFireZoo.” Given the image, and given Froog’s endorsement, naturally I had to visit FrostFireZoo myself.

Which was where I found the image below, and cracked up:

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Hard Questions

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From whiskey river:

The rest I have told you already

The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.
This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?

(by Louise Glück)

And (not from whiskey river):

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

(by Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

And finally, just for a change, something of an answer:

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.

(by Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth — one of my all-time favorite plays to read)

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Creating in the Margins

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After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences.

A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write a story with a given first and last sentence) and a specific deadline: Labor Day, September 1 (this Monday). I had plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime, but my main motivation was a sort of writer’s guilt. I was bothered, see, that I’d been so distracted by other stuff (marketing Merry-Go-Round, blogging, and then of course I do have a day job, a wife, and books to read!) — so distracted by all that stuff that I hadn’t been able to write something new.

(Well, I did write myself a few sentences into a MGR sequel. But that wasn’t “real” writing.)

The main effect of this objective was, alas, not that I sat down, raised the lid of my inkwell, and began to write. The main effect was to foster a different and somewhat more exquisite sort of writer’s guilt: the guilt of not-writing when you know you quote-unquote “have to.” Especially when under your own deadline (you know you can’t weasel out). Especially when you publicly announced your deadline (you know everyone will know, even if you do try to weasel out).

So this morning I’m lying in bed. The alarm has gone off once, been snoozed, and gone off (and been snoozed) again. I’m kind of semi-conscious. It’s 5 a.m.

Then a picture starts to form behind my eyelids: A man in a cabin, dusting something off, it’s not his cabin but someone else’s… Wait, no, that’s not dust — it’s snow… He picks up a scrap of paper and reads it… He finds another scrap of paper, and reads it, and sometime later he finds an old photograph…

…and so on, to the end.

There, in the crevasse between waking and sleeping (or between pokes at the snooze button, if you will), there I found my story.

I’ve always loved the sensation of falling asleep, even more than I like sleeping itself (which I love quite a bit!). But the transition to wakefulness can bring its own rewards.

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Cramming Technologies into an Elevator

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My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.

This doesn’t apply just to physical structures, to edifices. It applies, I think, to just about everything artificial.

One of Merry-Go-Round‘s underlying themes is the fragility of technology. Any one piece of equipment or software, even two or three, may work just fine after being tested and tested and tested. The word for this is “robustness”: the more robust a system, the closer it is to that magical (and mythical) state commonly known as fail-safe.

Where problems begin to arise is, yes, along the edges: those conceptual little nooks and crannies where the surfaces of multiple technologies come together.

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Will Cuppy

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The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them have). Instead, they’re authors who at one time or another bowled me over with the unexpected, offering surprising insights into what writing could possibly achieve.

One who didn’t make the cut, although I sure thought about including him, was Will Cuppy.

It was during the summer of 1964 that I first encountered Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Earlier that year I’d been introduced to James Thurber, thanks to my 7th-grade English teacher Mr. Krause; I had almost made up my mind that I wanted to grow up to be a Professional Humorist or, failing that, a Professional Teller of Occasional Jokes.

And then I hit Cuppy. (It was almost exactly like that, a collision.)

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They Call the Wind… Fay? (2)

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[Continued from yesterday’s brief “We’re still here!” post.  All images accompanying this post come from the online “Readers’ Gallery” of photos posted at our local newspaper’s site.]

Dear Family —

I know some of you have been keeping a watchful eye (“eye”: ha ha ha) on The Weather Channel for news of the damages suffered to our neck of the woods.

You may remember a post by my good friend FLJerseyBoy, three years ago (in his long-defunct Where Left Is Right blog), which talked at greater length about TWC:

The point is this: The Weather Channel doesn’t need to scare us. Yes, of course, people need to be warned. They need to watch the skies, especially with the help of The Weather Channel’s (and NOAA’s and others’) undoubtedly informative and beautifully computer-enhanced images. They need to have supplies on hand, and to prepare themselves for the interruption of essential services like electricity and water.

What people don’t need is a bombardment of ever-more alarming reports from shouting jackasses in windbreakers, leaning into the wind and rain as floodwaters rise around their ankles and houses and cars tumble by in the background. They don’t need it for themselves, and their distant families and friends — unfamiliar with the relevant geographic scales, and thus unaware (for instance) that a hurricane’s likely landfall is hundreds of miles away — sure as hell don’t need it either.

I’m with him. There’s no way The Weather Channel’s talking rain-spattered heads can possibly paint a decent picture of every neighborhood’s experience during a storm. So I hope you aren’t even now watching the statistics scroll by on your screens, with voiceovers by grim-faced tight-lipped anchorpeople — watching, and wondering what on earth might be happening with John and The Missus.

So let me put your minds at ease.

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